Digital marketing is made up of many different techniques and methods. Paid search is one of these techniques that have proved quite popular. Paid search marketing comes in many names these days like search engine marketing, pay per click, cost per click, cost per impression, sponsored listings, and search engine advertisement or paid for placement. If you are a newcomer to the world of digital marketing, all these terms might be a tad confusing. Let’s take a look at the basic meaning of the term paid search. Paid search marketing actually refers to the process of advertising using sponsored listings in a search engine or on a partner site by paying for each time the ad is displayed or clicked.

Cost per Click

This type of paid search involves paying the search engine for each time a user clicks your ad. This is often used in order to improve sales by companies or firms.

Cost Per Impression

This type of paid search marketing involves paying the search engine once your ad appears 1000 times on the user. No clicking is required from the user’s end. This is often used by companies or firms who are looking at boosting their brand awareness.

Google AdWords

This is an advertising product straight from Google, and it offers pay per click as well as cost per impression as well. Interestingly, AdWords is one of the main sources of revenue for Google.

At the end of the day, the goal of any digital marketing firm is to ensure that their client url or name appears at the top of the SERPs. It is essential to be in the top five searches to be relevant to the user and having a chance of being clicked on. Pay per click is the easiest way to the reach the top of the SERPs, if you have the cash to back it up. Unfortunately, it is out of reach for most small businesses.

SEO is one of the widely adopted online marketing strategies by different companies all over the world. It is considered to be extremely effective in building brand awareness as well as promoting the firm products and services. Here are a few advantages to running a successful digital marketing campaign:

Increased Site traffic

When your website manages to reach the top of the SERPS, it leads to an increase in web traffic. As a result, you need to be better prepared for the new influx of incoming visitors. With the right usage of keyword placements within your Meta tags, you can improve your ranking in the SERPS and pull in more traffic, which will ultimately lead t more sales.

Better Return On investment

SEO firms can track the ups and downs of the SERPS, visitors to the websites, the time each visitor spends on a page and so on. This helps in keeping track of the traffic which leads to actual sales. This can also help you change the content on your website to ensure that visitors spend more time on it and are motivated to part with their hard-earned money for the services or products that you offer.

Cost Effectiveness

SEO is a very cost effective strategy as it helps target the exact consumers you are looking for. This is a lot more effectual than traditional methods of targeting like cold calling, or mass media targeting. Since SEO helps find people who are already interested in your produces by doing keyword research, it is literally delivering you new customers on a silver platter to your doorstep.

Increased Site Usability

SEO can help make your website easier to navigate through for your users. This helps drive up traffic, which ultimately leads to more sales for the company or firm. The easier it is to navigate through a site, the longer the visitor stays on the site and there is also a higher chance of the user returning to the site as well.

Content marketing is a marketing approach where the focus is on creating relevant and valuable content that will attract the attention of the audience and help retain it as well. Instead of the age old custom of pitching to your prospective clients, you offer valuable and relevant content to them, which ultimately leads them to your products or services. Content marketing is actually very strategic in the way it brings new customers to you rather than the other way around. Many companies and firms have started embracing content marketing after seeing the huge success it is bringing to their competitors.

Here are the 3 main reasons why you should seriously consider content marketing for your company:

Cost Savings

Increased Sales

Better customers who offer better loyalty

These three advantages can help take any company straight to its goal. With the right content marketing, you can reach the right segment of customers, making your marketing campaign very successful. It does not matter what form of marketing you are implementing unless you don’t have great quality content. Quality content ensures the success of any kind of marketing strategy. Combine this along with digital marketing, and you have a fireball on your hands.

Social media marketing is another way to push your quality content onto new customers. Many SEO firms use social media as a way to reach out to new customers or to create more brand awareness and even to push new promotions or offers. If you plan on running an effective digital marketing campaign, there are several things you need to consider to create quality content that is both valuable and helps retain customers.

The best advantage of content marketing is that you can always keep updating it to keep your customers interested; it is also another way of offering them information that is relevant to their field of interest. As time goes by, you will soon be considered an authority in that particular field, which will ultimately lead to more sales for your company!

You need to be extremely competitive to survive in today’s world of digital marketing. Here are a few tips for newcomers to make their entrance into this complicated world of marketing:

Learn More About PPC

The results that are displayed at the top and on the side of a search engine page are often paid search ads. These ads are displayed to provoke the user to click on them to be taken to the landing page of the company. You are in competition with other companies for these top spots, and you only need to pay each time someone clicks on your ads.

Have Well Defined Goals

You need to have well defined goals in order to accomplish your target. Once you have a fixed idea is to what will happen once your visitor lands on your landing page, and what action you would like to take, it makes it easier to plan out your marketing campaign.

Select An Apt PPC Platform

There are several platforms available that have pay per click advertising for companies and firms like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, etc. Each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. You need to research all the platforms and choose the one that suits your requirements.

Several types of content marketing have become popular in the last couple of years. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Social Media Posts

With several platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. offering people to air their views and opinions, it has also become a platform for firms and companies to air their content about topics of relevance to them.

Videos

Videos are very effective in delivering messages to the viewers. It is easily understood and can make complex messages seem very simple as well. With several platforms offering the ability to share videos, this practical type of content marketing has picked o in the recent years.

Images

A picture is the equivalent of a thousand words. Similarly, images have the power to deliver your message in one powerful swoop. You can also create socially apt images with your company logo, which can create a lot of positive vibes for the company without shelling out any extra money.

How-to guides

People are often on the lookout for guides to learn new methods and techniques. Your company can put out content in the form of how to guides to promote the company brand amongst people this way. It also builds goodwill towards the company, which is one of the targets of a successful marketing campaign.

In the early nineties, search engines came out with submission forms that had to be filled out to be a part of the optimization process. Most website owners would then tag their websites and webpages with the required keyword information and then submit this to the search engines. Then the next process involved a bot crawling through these websites to be indexed. However, this did not work out very well since most submissions turned out to be spam content. Since 2001, the submission form process was discarded and earning links from other sites was given more prominence. If you go digging, you will be able to find samples of these ancient submission forms on one of the search engines.

A long time back, Meta tags were deemed to be very important to the SEO process, and it was necessary to include the keywords in your Meta tags. So that when the users typed in those keywords, your page would pop up in the results. However, this particular process was spammed a lot and was finally dropped by major search engines. Interestingly this has led to the Meta tags not being the sole focus of the crawler bots today.

Interestingly, many people made the mistake of stuffing their keyword with too many keywords making it appear as spam. Even though many tools se keywords as a measure of how relevant the content of a website is, keyword stuffing is frowned upon. Having more natural links to your website displays the presence of quality content better than a high keyword density. So if you manage to get a good editorial link from an authoritative site to your website, you will be able to improve your SERPs in no time at all. Today’s search algorithms are programmed to pick on any keyword stuffing quickly, so beware from bringing down your page ranking with a rookie mistake.

Keyword research is the first step to be taken in creating an effective search marketing campaign. If the wrong keywords are used, the advertising budget goes for a toss, including all the effort that is put into creating the marketing campaign. Specialized keyword tools can prove to be very beneficial in making your marketing campaign successful.

Negative keywords are used by experts to filter out the search terms that are not important to the product or service that you are marketing. This helps save plenty of money, as it helps avoid our advertisements from showing up when these negative keywords are searched for by the users. Long tail keywords are great candidates for paid search campaigns, as people who tend to search for longer and more specific keywords are actually looking to make a purchase.

Once you have done your keyword research, you need to ensure that you make use of these keywords while creating your landing page. Google is very vigilant about the accuracy, and this allows marketers from earning their keep with honest practices. After getting a list of keywords to boost your campaigning efforts, the next step involves creating relevant test ads. The higher the click through rate n these text ads, the more cost effective is the paid search marketing campaign.

The ad text needs to answer the user’s query directly to provoke them to click on the ad. Usually, these texts are created to be eye catchy with the right keywords to tease the user into clicking on the link to go to the landing page. After you have mastered these steps, you can check your performance using the performance grader too. There are several such free tools to help you evaluate how successful you are with your digital marketing strategy. It also offers you a chance to make changes to your marketing campaign to get better results and more clicks.